To use a golf analogy, Willard Romney is six holes down with eight to play.

It looks like the job of fighting to destroy our Constitutional rights, Social Security and Medicare and what’s left of the middle class will fall on the capable shoulders of Barack Obama.

Barring outside events, the Presidential election is pretty much a done deal. Romney needs to start locking up about a state per week through the election, and he’s losing ground.

Outside of the MoE, sure, but outside of VSF (Voter-Suppression Factor)? Maybe.

**sigh** Romney isn’t meant to win an election. Please see Matt Stoller:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/10-arguments-the-republicans-arent-making-or-why-the-gop-doesnt-mind-losing-in-2012.html

The Republicans don’t want to discuss tax cheating, offshoring, corruption, inequality, dissent, the rule of law, endless war, or Wall Street criminality. They’d rather lose. It’s not that they want to lose in 2012, it’s just that they aren’t going to go after every vote. It’s the same reason no one talks about how Romney is a flip-flopper anymore, or points out that Romney is the architect of Obamacare, or was a moderate Republican governor in Massachusetts. Those arguments are worse for the political class, and better for the public. And that is how elections operate in authoritarian America. The secondary goal is to win the election, the primary goal is to keep the public out of the deal-making.

Nate Silver’s multi-poll model shows that the latest polls actually level off after the convention bounce. No telling how the unrest in the Middle East catalyzed by an anti-Muslim hit-job movie (not that there weren’t folks ready to take advantage of it as cover) and Mitt’s response to it will play out. Pam Geller, Daniel Pipes, and David Horowitz must be proud of their good buddy poking the hornet’s nest before the election.

House Speaker Bonehead plays a lot of golf. He knows a losing round when he’s in the middle of one. If it’s an 18-hole round of golf to get through an eleven-month election cycle, I’d say Willard is six strokes down with three holes to play. He double-bogeyed this month by shooting off his mouth about foreign policy & trying to blame preznit for dead diplomats.

My gut — Bonehead knows preznit is gonna get re-elected, which is why he caved on the six-month extension of federal spending this week. If preznit gets another four years, what are Bonehead’s chances of retaining his Speakership?

Thank goodness! If Obama had lost, that might have discouraged future Democrats from assassinating American citizens, locking people up indefinitely without trial, and funneling money to rich corporations!

Does Nate Silver agree with this?

If Obama wins just one of these three big swing states he will likely get re-election, but for Romney to get to 270 he needs to win all three.

If preznit gets another four years, what are Bonehead’s chances of retaining his Speakership?

I expect the House to swing back to the Democrats, and Boehner will get to spend more time on the golf course. Even if the Republicans cling to power, I can’t imagine they will keep him. Worst Speaker in History.

If Romney needs all three (he does), and if Obama wins one of the three, then Romney loses because he doesn’t get all three.

You can play some games with very low probability sets of states, but basically if Romney can’t win Florida, it’s all over.

I canvassed in OH & VA in both 2004 & 2008 in the general. IIRC Kerry was behind in OH by about six points in Sept. and closed the gap to less than one percent in Nov. but lost OH because Cuyahoga County machine politicians (Dems) refused to fund adequate voting machines for poor black voters. In VA, Kerry never had a chance. Obama never had a lead in VA until the final weekend. His victory margin in VA was so tiny that every one of us who canvassed in northern VA suburbs could claim that our county was the one that put him over the top. I forget what Obama did in OH at the end.

My district, MI-11, is a gift to the Democrats–if they decide to take it. Thaddeus McCotter got bounced off the ballot because his staff forged his nominating petitions, and the Republican nominee is a Tea Partier with an anger-management problem and views far outside the mainstream of GOP thinking (9/11 truther, against deporting undocumented immigrants, bring all troops home). The guy makes Allen West, the looney-tunes congressman from Florida, sound like George Washington Carver.

But what does Nate Silver say about that?

Obama carried Ohio by 4.6 points.

That “bring all the troops home” part doesn’t sound looney-tunes to me, but I guess you’re saying MI repubs wouldn’t like that.

Thanks. Dems learned their lesson from the Cleveland clusterfuck in 2004. (And no, GOP didn’t steal OH in 2004, the Dems screwed themselves by trying to cheat poor, black, unemployed voters in Cleveland and Columbus.)

Yup.

Back in the old USSR, there were plenty of elections, but all the candidates were selected by the Communist Party.

Here in the USA, there are plenty of elections, but all the candidates are whores for the 1%.

Same deal. Plenty of elections, but no choices.

I’m just pointing out that the polls represent a post-convention peak, not that Obama has a reduced likelihood of being re-elected. Nate Silver’s model has that at over 70% probability and an popular vote projection of over 50%.

I’m just pointing out that no one can predict how the events in the Muslim world will play in the coming weeks. The conventional wisdom is that Romney has totally blown the election, and the GOP is heading off to firewall the downticket races.

I agree that “bring the troops home” isn’t looney-tunes, but most Republicans want to double down on George W. Bush’s saber-rattling.

If anything, the R candidate in MI-11 (his name is Kerry Bentivolio) holds even more radical views than Ron Paul. If rank-and-file Republicans were made aware of that, many of them would either vote for the Democrat or pass the race.

Some stock market watchers believe that the Fed’s decision yesterday to pursue quantitative easing indefinitely won Obama a second term.

The Dow Jones Industrials are about 5,000 points higher today than when Obama took office.

When the going gets tough, the Rs go golfing. R$ is no good at golf, apparently. In our state, I hope the Ds benefit down-ticket, it is the only hope we have here. Gotta keep our mean Governator in check.

But you can count on the Dems to continue their stupidity and not fund the race. DNC is keeping ALL the $$$ for Obama.

I got a call from the DCCC yesterday, and in response to my listing the 17,826 reasons I was NOT donating, the poor shmuck acknowledged that the DNC is keeping all the money, leaving Congressional candidates on their own.

I informed said shmuck that I was supporting individual Dem congressional candidates, but NFW was I giving my money to folks who’d doled it out in the past to candidates like Health Schuler.

The GOP already know they’ve got this election in the bag. What Mitt says doesn’t matter. What Mitt does doesn’t matter. Using a combination of voter disenfranchisement, poll place chicanery, voting machine rigging, and other methods they will win this election. It will likely be called a “squeaker”, but that doesn’t matter. They’ll be in the white house. They’ll likely be discovered as illegally elected (as GWB was), but the SCOTUS will install him. He’ll be in the white house. Once in, the GOP will move to insure they will NEVER EVER lose the white house ever again and the USA as we know it will be lost forever. The 1% will use us as an ATM machine and the American worker will be relegated to a status of slave for the corporate machine (even worse than now). Republicans hate the USA, and they hate USA values and workers. They are a stain.

It might do something for two months, but it’s a sugar high. Wall Street loves it but it will not trickle down.

It’s the Clinton Bump and will soon fade. I still think the election will be close enough for the Republicans to steal.

http://youtu.be/keICw8_rYYY

Yesterday I got an email from the Michigan Dems’ State Chairman for Life, Mark Brewer. He was soliciting donations for MI-11: not for the general election, but for a special election to fill the rest of the term of Thaddeus McCotter, who abruptly resigned from Congress. Why spend a nickel on an election to send someone to Washington for the lame-duck session? That defies my imagination.

I voted for Obama last time. In fact I cried with relief that maybe we had finally elected someone who would do something for common Americans, things were so bad in our country. Then he showed himself to be just another stinking mouthpiece of the elite and I swore that I would never vote for him again, but that has changed. The very idea of the lying, cheating, wormy piece of shit that the republicans have come up with and the nazi in sheep’s clothing he had selected for him by his masters makes it clear that there is no choice for the American people, so I am forced to vote for the lesser of two evils and it is clearly Obama. I also suspect that most Americans feel the same way. This country needs it own revolution to bring down this criminal cabal called the United States Congress. I often wonder why we are the most hated country on the planet and I am beginning to realize that all governments are for is to control the people and continue to enrich the elites.
They’ve pretty much got all of the rest of the world under control, but know that there are 200 million weapons out here in America and millions of people who know how to use them effectively. I don’t think it will be too long before that starts to happen.
I actually expect Israel to nuke Iran if Obama delays much longer, then we will be in perpetual war and all of us will be targets!

This is great. Hang the current failures strongly around Obama’s neck. Watch him suffer for his sins, and enjoy it. I’m looking forward to it. I might even vote for him. (just kidding)